Don't blame Labour. It's all the bankers fault.

According to this article in the Lancashire Telegraph, the problems with the national debt are nothing to do with Labour. It's all the bankers fault.


Excuse to ‘roll back the state’

AS you would expect from a Tory councillor, Brian Gordon blames all the country’s current economic difficulties on the previous Labour governments.

Of course he does. New Labour used to believe that money appears out of thin air, just through the power of positive thought. Labour created a huge public sector and massive welfare dependency. They also took us to war twice. Maybe that's why.

There’s no surprise about that, but it is surprising that, nowhere in his brief outline of recent financial history, does he mention the role of the bankers.

The role of the bankers? (You notice how he didn't defend Labours record there? He just deflects the issue on to someone else). So what is the role of the bankers?

These are the people who, through irresponsible lending policies and a culture of sky-high bonuses, brought a number of high-street banks to their knees and forced the Labour government to spend billions of pounds to prevent their complete collapse and the loss of many people’s savings.

OK, so it's vilify the bankers time. Bankers have lots of money, ergo, we should hold them in contempt.
Their lending policies may have been irresponsible. They are private institutions, and when a private business is irresponsible with the money it makes, it goes bust. Nobody forced Labour to spend billions of pounds to help out the banks. They did that through choice. Because of the inbred desire of politicians to be seen to "be doing something" they spent billions of pounds of taxpayers money to bail out a private businesses that were in trouble.
Had the banks been left to go to the wall, and people did loose their savings, it may have woke people up to the fact that they are investing in a private business and nothing is guaranteed.
New Labour preferred to have people think that no matter what they did, the government would be there with a big pile of cash to help them out if it went wrong.
I wrote in the early days of this blog, about how the banking crisis kicked off in England and how, in my opinion, it could have been stopped without spending any money at all.
A culture of sky high bonuses? Bonuses bigger even, than Mps expenses. Again, banks are a private institution. It's no business of anyone else, what bonuses they choose to pay. Some of the banks did not get bailed out. It may be justified to take a pop at the banks that were bailed out, for still paying massive bonuses, but not the ones that didn't.
And why do they pay such big bonuses? They don't pay them to the tellers or the bank managers. Banks employ people to take investors money and grow it. These people will take ten or twenty million quid, invest it around the world and turn it into thirty or forty million quid. These are the people who get the big bonuses. These people are quite rare.

This expenditure is recognised by most economists as playing a major part in the current debt crisis but, for Coun Gordon, it doesn’t even rate a mention.

Maybe that's because Councilor Gordon sees the banking issue as just another failed Labour economic policy among many, rather that simply vilifying bankers because it is currently in fashion.

There’s a reason for this surprising omission – the Tories have set their sights on scrapping many of the improvements in public provision brought in by Labour (they call it ‘rolling back the state’) and it is convenient to blame the current economic problems on public sector spending to disguise a set of political choices being made by the coalition government.

The set of political choices, "rolling back the state", is being made because it is totally necessary. In fact, all the cuts seen so far only scratch at the surface. Loads more needs to be done before the economy becomes sustainable once again.
The so called improvements to public provision are simply massive wastes of taxpayer money. Fake charities, regeneration, welfare, none of it is necessary, it's just vote buying and pandering to the terminally lazy or nosey.

Mentioning the irresponsibility of the bankers would simply get in the way of a good story.
So, an economic crisis caused by the profligacy of the banks and solved by attacking the living standards of ordinary people and the mass sacking of public sector workers – that’s fairness, ConDem style.

Now he tells us the economic crisis was caused solely by the bankers. Labour is absolved of all blame. This could not be further from the truth.
It is not the place of the government to spend rafts of taxpayers cash on "the living standards of ordinary people".
It's not the place of the government to create a bloated public sector.
The collectivist who wrote this rubbish does not see that. He's another one who takes a pop at bankers because they have more money than him. He's another one who thinks you can shit money whenever you please.

Who is he anyway?

PHIL RILEY, Secretary Blackburn Labour Party.

Ahhh....